The New Autocracy

Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin's Russia

Daniel Treisman

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780815732440
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politischer Prozess

Corruption, fake news, and the "informational autocracy" sustaining Putin in power

After fading into the background for many years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia suddenly has emerged as a new threat—at least in the minds of many Westerners. But Western assumptions about Russia, and in particular about political decision-making in Russia, tend to be out of date or just plain wrong.

Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin since 2000, Russia is neither a somewhat reduced version of the Soviet Union nor a classic police state. Corruption is prevalent at all levels of government and business, but Russia's leaders pursue broader and more complex goals than one would expect in a typical kleptocracy, such as those in many developing countries. Nor does Russia fit the standard political science model of a "competitive authoritarian" regime; its parliament, political parties, and other political bodies are neither fakes to fool the West nor forums for bargaining among the elites.

The result of a two-year collaboration between top Russian experts and Western political scholars, Autocracy explores the complex roles of Russia's presidency, security services, parliament, media and other actors. The authors argue that Putin has created an "informational autocracy," which relies more on media manipulation than on the comprehensive repression of traditional dictatorships. The fake news, hackers, and trolls that featured in Russia's foreign policy during the 2016 U.S. presidential election are also favored tools of Putin's domestic regime—along with internet restrictions, state television, and copious in-house surveys. While these tactics have been successful in the short run, the regime that depends on them already shows signs of age: over-centralization, a narrowing of information flows, and a reliance on informal fixers to bypass the bureaucracy. The regime's challenge will be to continue to block social modernization without undermining the leadership's own capabilities.

ONE

Introduction

Rethinking Putin’s Political Order

DANIEL TREISMAN

How are political decisions made in Russia today? The increasingly tense relations between the world’s second nuclear power and the West make understanding that process particularly urgent. Yet many images popular in the media and academia, although capturing some element of Russia’s political scene, do not seem quite right.

To certain observers, the regime of Vladimir Putin looks like a spruced-up replica of the USSR of Leonid Brezhnev.1 Once again, the Kremlin is harassing domestic critics and censoring the press. Putin, who once declared the Soviet disintegration a “geopolitical catastrophe,” seems intent on reversing it, bringing lands lost in 1991 back under Moscow’s control (Shevtsova 2014). Having restored the Soviet national anthem, the Russian president is now said to rule by means of what one analyst, perhaps tongue in cheek, calls a “Politburo 2.0” (Minchenko 2013).

Others see the current regime as an offshoot not of the Soviet Union per se but of its most feared institution—the State Security Committee (KGB), or, more broadly, the security and law enforcement agencies, whose officers and veterans are known in Russian as the siloviki. Putin, the onetime spy, is cast as the executor of a covert project to establish his former agency’s dominance. Analysts portray the siloviki as a cohesive clan, now entrenched within both the Russian polity and the country’s corporate boardrooms (Petrov 2002; Kryshtanovskaya and White 2003, 2009; Treisman 2008).

To still others, the Putin regime is essentially a kleptocracy, whose leaders’ central aim is “to loot the country without limit” (Dawisha 2015, p. 3). Putin and his cronies—mostly old friends from St. Petersburg—are said to have enmeshed the state in nationwide networks of corruption. To understand Russian politics today, so this argument goes, one simply needs to follow the money.

While these three images emphasize the personal history and choices of Russia’s second president, a fourth image sees him as the instrument of something larger. Russian public life, it is said, is governed by sistema. What sistema—literally “the system”—means depends on who is writing. In one view, it represents informal “power networks that account for the failure to implement leaders’ political will” (Ledeneva 2013, p. 4). In another, it is a “style of exercising power that turns the country’s people into temporary operating resources” (Pavlovsky 2016, p. 14). The various usages share the notion of something timeless, rooted in culture, that blocks reform and devalues individual rights.

Finally, political scientists who look at Russia often find in it an example of “competitive authoritarianism,” a type of regime that converts seemingly democratic institutions into props for dictatorship (Levitsky and Way 2010).2 In such orders, elections are held not to choose new leaders but to intimidate the dissidents (Magaloni 2006). Legislatures exist not to deliberate over laws but to co-opt potential opposition or to enforce deals between the dictator and other power holders (Gandhi and Przeworski 2006; Boix and Svolik 2013). The façade of democracy is constructed in part to earn respectability and Western aid.

These images point to some recognizable features of Russia under Putin. Yet, as a guide to the country’s politics and policy, they seem inadequate. Each highlights one aspect, while neglecting others. Each ignores much of what actually happens, day to day, in Russian government. By emphasizing continuities and cultural stickiness, the neo-Soviet, KGB state, and sistema interpretations create a misleading impression of stasis. They underplay the dramatic ways the country has changed over the past twenty-five years and imply a coherence that is hard to fit with the facts.

Like the Soviet Union, Russia today has a strong leader, a centralized state, superpower ambitions, and an aggressive foreign policy. Yet, unlike the USSR, it lacks a cohesive ruling party and a communist ideology. It has—for the most part—open borders and a market economy. Indeed, many of its leaders are eager capitalists, with their own businesses on the side (Lamberova and Sonin, this volume). The Soviet Politburo after Joseph Stalin, although dominated by the general secretary, contained a number of political heavyweights with their own bureaucratic resources. There is nothing comparable in Putin’s Russia. And, for all the propaganda on today’s Kremlin-controlled television, the country remains far more open to information than in Soviet times.

Russia is also not a KGB state. In fact, the security services are so fragmented by clan, factional, and interagency rivalries, so divided by generational, bureaucratic, and personal conflicts, that they cannot act cohesively (Soldatov and Rochlitz, this volume). They lack a leader who could make demands on the president. Within government and the higher echelons of the Presidential Administration, the presence of siloviki actually peaked around 2008 and then fell, with individuals from private business mostly filling the gap.3 In high-stakes battles, top siloviki sometimes lose to big business people or other actors. In 2011, for example, the billionaire Mikhail Fridman fought to prevent the oil company Rosneft, led by Putin’s friend Igor Sechin, from partnering with BP to explore the Arctic. Despite Sechin’s security service background and personal ties to the president, Fridman won.

Although they have not captured the state, the enforcers have largely captured the criminal justice system, co-opting and weakening the courts (Paneyakh and Rosenberg, this volume). Some key siloviki have participated in top discussions. But they do so not as holders of particular posts but as longtime, trusted confidants of Putin. And their access can end suddenly, as when Putin abruptly retired three of his closest security service colleagues in 2016 (Soldatov and Rochlitz, this volume). Beyond such personal relationships, the influence of the siloviki reflects two factors. First, their vision of a Russia besieged by the West seems—at least judging from Putin’s public comments—to fit more and more closely with the president’s own evolving vision of the world. The Arab Spring and Russia’s Facebook protests of 2011–12 appeared to validate the siloviki’s warnings that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was fomenting color revolutions and had plans for one in Moscow. Second, the top security service bosses control most flows of information to the president.

That leading Russian politicians benefit from massive corruption and links to organized crime has been credibly reported more than once.4 A few close Putin associates—and others connected to them—have become extremely rich during the boom years, although their returns fell sharply when oil revenues sank (Lamberova and Sonin, this volume). But calling Russia a kleptocracy does not help much in understanding its politics. Many key decisions—such as the intervention in Syria or the support for insurgents in Donbass despite the risk of Western sanctions—make little sense in terms of Kremlin bigwigs’ mercenary interests. Most state decisions have no direct impact on top officials’ offshore accounts. And if corruption and theft are all the Kremlin cares about, it is puzzling how and why some difficult tasks, such as the reform and modernization of the Russian armed forces between 2008 and 2014, still get done.

Accounts of sistema sound plausible to anyone who has spent time in Russia. Yet in their vagueness and generality, they explain too little and too much. Too little because such images focus on how decisions are—or are not—implemented and say nothing about what goals decisionmakers choose to pursue. Too much because—although authors of course recognize that some change does happen—sistema seems only to explain how it is blocked. That extensive modernization, in fact, has occurred becomes even more mysterious if one sees the society and state as trapped in a premodern matrix of informal codes, cultural norms, and personal relationships. And if formal laws and regulations are routinely subverted, it is puzzling that top leaders invest so much time and effort in enacting them.

Calling Russia a case of “competitive authoritarianism” helps focus attention on what is and what is not unique about its current order. But, as the following chapters suggest, various aspects of Russia’s politics do not fit prevailing understandings of how such regimes work. The parliament turns out to be neither a complete façade—a “rubber stamp”—nor a venue for co-opting regime opponents or enforcing bargains between elites and a dictator. Rather, it is a forum for battles over policies among rival bureaucratic—and occasionally business—actors (Noble and Schulmann, this volume). In most cases, the results represent not some compromise between the parties or some co-optation payoff but rather the relative skill, luck, and persistence of the players in a complicated game.

Elections, rather than intimidating the opposition by means of inflated “supermajorities,” seem to have mobilized regime critics, sparking angry demonstrations in 2011–12.5 Meanwhile, Putin’s preservation of superficially democratic institutions is certainly not a bid for Western aid, since Russia receives none and seeks to outlaw international agencies that presume to deliver any. If the point is to win respectability in the West, the defiant openness with which the authorities persecute the political opposition is surprising.

In this book, we attempt to construct a richer picture of how Russian political decisions are made today. Our approach is empirical and inductive. By observing all that can be observed about the role and participation of key actors, we seek to develop a comprehensive understanding of how the system operates, its strengths and weaknesses, and its potential for change. To be clear, this book does not claim to answer all the questions left hanging by previous accounts. And, to be fair, elements of some of the images criticized above also appear in ours. But from an intensive examination of available evidence, a number of new themes emerge.

MORE MODERN

A first theme is that it is impossible to understand Russia’s politics today without paying attention to the dramatic change that occurred in society between 1999 and 2011. During these years, Russia was modernizing rapidly. This process both shaped the Putin regime and created the emerging threats to it that prompted the Kremlin’s reactionary turn.

Of course, Russia had industrialized—and overindustrialized—already during the Soviet period. As of 1990, 73 percent of the population lived in cities and 40 percent of those employed worked in industry—15 percentage points more than in the United States. The phase of modernization that beckoned, as communism collapsed, was the transition to a postindustrial society. That meant shrinking industry and creating an advanced service sector. Over the next decade, the economy did deindustrialize. By 1999, the employment share of industry had fallen to 28 percent, about the level in Ireland. Meanwhile, service sector employment rose from 46 to 57 percent.6 This restructuring was accompanied by a wrenching economic contraction and a decline in living standards for much of the population.

When the rebound came, the pace was dramatic. Between 1999 and 2011, Russia’s GDP per capita rose from a little under US$13,000 to US$24,000.7 Living standards surged even faster. Adjusted for inflation, average wages and pensions both increased by 11 percent a year throughout this period. It was during this broad-based boom that Russia experienced the kind of changes in consumption, education, information technology, media, and global integration that sociologists associate with postindustrial society (Bell 1973).

As incomes grew, Russia became a land of consumers, with chain stores and multiplexes spreading across the country. By 2012, Moscow contained more mall space than any other European city; Russia had more than twice as many hotels as it had in 2000 and more ATMs per person than either Japan or the United Kingdom (Kramer 2013; Rosstat 2013b; IMF 2014).

Communications also underwent a revolution. When Putin first took office, only one in every forty-five people had a cell phone subscription. By 2011, Russians had 1.8 subscriptions per person. Back in 1999, hardly any Russian families owned a computer and the Internet was virtually unknown. By 2012, three quarters of households contained a computer and 64 million people (55 percent of the population) were logging on to the Internet at least once a month; by 2016 this figure had risen to 81 million people (69 percent of the population).8 Along the way, Russian edged out German to become the second-most-used language on the web.9 Social networks—both...